Latest News and Updates

What do you get someone conducting a PhD for Christmas? Apart from the obvious staples of coffee, chocolate, a book voucher? Well, last week we received an order from someone who bought VivaCards for four of her friends. This is what she said: I am a year away from my viva so are my friends so […]

We’ve been absolutely delighted with the feedback we’ve received for VivaCards so far. A lot of feedback has come via tweets so we’ve created a custom timeline and embedded it within this post…you can take a look at what people are saying, and it should stay updated as new tweets come in. You’ll need to […]

It’s early days for Viva Cards but just over two weeks ago we launched this website and we’ve had a steady trickle of sales since then. The very first response we got was a tweet from Nadine Muller. If I’m completely honest my heart sank when I read it, because I could completely see where […]

I am reviewing the cards as a qualitative nurse educator and doctoral candidate working in hospice care. I do a lot of conference presentations. I specialise in teaching my thesis topic. I am 5 months away from submitting my thesis, so busy writing up. I am a new passionate advocate of Twitter. What do I […]

This is the million dollar question, and while there are no guarantees, I’m confident the answer is yes! In order to produce a tool that is general enough to work for a mass audience the questions are not specific to any discipline or topic. That said, feedback received so far suggests that they are useful, […]

There are various ways in which the cards could be used and over the coming months we’ll be adding ideas shared on twitter about how they’re most helpful. As an initial exercise, the following steps are recommended: Read through all the questions once. Don’t spend too long thinking about them, just familiarise yourself with the […]

There are 44 cards in the box, one introducing the categorisation and the others falling into one of the four categories. The categories are roughly parallel to what you’re likely to have written about in your thesis, and the type of questioning offered by most examiners. They are: Introduction and context Methods, design and analysis […]

Over ten years ago, after four hard years of slog, I sat my own PhD viva. If I’m completely honest I didn’t know how to prepare for my viva, and there wasn’t a lot of support available (this was the days before social media or online discussion forums) so I just recovered and relaxed for […]